hit 69 yesterday, but it might be some time before I can hit 70 and start gearing myself up now....

Assume that my time is limited....mostly (group) quest rewards or quick instances (under 1.5-2 hours), and that unless mats are expensive (ie 4 HoD with bracers of renewed life) I should be able to supply mats for crafters. What would you recommend me getting itemwise?

Also what professions would be useful for resto...or druids in general? currently herb/mining. And what factions would you recommend rep grinding?

Both Lealla and I went Herb/Alch on our resto druids, as you know, Pale. Being able to make your own mana pots is hella useful, especially if your Spirit is low.

Grinding CE rep is prolly useful for the healing OH Orb that you can access at CE exalted. Sha'tar rep should also be useful for the healing 1h mace. Nothing else is coming to mind atm except for grinding Kara rep for the Violet Eye signet healing ring, but then you knew that.

Tribal LW is excellent for pre-T5 Druids for the Windhawk set. Engineering gets you a lovely helm and some other nice goodies. JC gets you some nice neck pieces. Enchanting lets you enchant your rings. Alchemy is nice for the reasons Stask mentioned, plus you get the best healing trinket currently in the game. If you want healing gear and don't mind wearing cloth, Tailoring gets you the Primal Mooncloth set, which does not entirely suck (lack of Stamina notwithstanding).

Obviously, you have little use for Blacksmithing, but that's about it.

The rep gear pretty much sucks: by the time you've completed the grind (hopefully through Heroics) you should already have enough badges to get better stuff, especially if you've been running Kara too. Make sure to grind for the faction that gives you the healing head enchant (CE?) as well as Aldor/Scryer for shoulders. Violet Eye for the healing ring. There's a nice healing mace too; I don't remember if it's LC or Sha'tar.

For BoE crafted items, there's precious little in the leather camp that doesn't take HoDs, but you can get one or two nice cloth items from SSC/TK patterns (Belt of the Long Road + Boots if you're a tailor). There's a decent BoE leather helm from leatherworking. Fill in the rest with badge gear.

I agree =\ Haven't set foot in Botanica yet, and according to the resto druid cheat sheet linked in OP it has a few resto items. If I wanted to go craftables, I was thinking maybe a tk/ssc long road recipe or a similar leather one (if there is any), or go whitemend pair.

Is there a recommended benchmark statswise as far as being able to heal 5-mans? I might go resto when asked also because I suspect it'll be easier to heal than to tank (don't have alot of def/dodge and i sure as hell don't have alot of hit rating).

The only other two questions I can think of at this point is:
1) What add-ons and macros would you recommend for resto spec?
2) Barring a movement heavy fight, would it be better to raid/party heal in tree form or non-tree form?

Last edited by Palehorse on Fri Sep 12, 2008 2:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Palehorse wrote:The only other two questions I can think of at this point is:
1) What add-ons and macros would you recommend for resto spec?
2) Barring a movement heavy fight, would it be better to raid/party heal in tree form or non-tree form?

1) There's nothing special about Resto that requires addons that any other healer wouldn't use too. Get a good set of raid frames and ideally a click casting addon. There's only one macro that you should absolutely have: Nature's Swiftness + Healing Touch; everything else is just preference. I know I've published the NS+HT one in several places. As a Druid generally, I have a mount/escape macro that manages Flight/Aquatic/Travel/Cat Form along with my mounts, plus some stuff devoted to caster DPS and the usual focus CC macro for Entangling Roots and Hurricane.

2) When party/raid healing, you want to stay in Tree of Life as much as possible. The mana efficiency alone is worth it, not to mention the party healing bonus. The most common reason to leave Tree is to cast Remove Curse (fortunately that problem goes away in 3.x ), and the second most common is to cast NS+HT (see above). There's never any good reason to use Healing Touch otherwise, and that's the only healing spell that can't be used in ToL (and again, 3.x removes the restriction).

There are very few "movement sensitive" fights where being in Tree will make any serious difference; the ones I can think of offhand are Void Reaver (dodging orbs), Kael'thas (Thaladred's gaze), and Supremus (gaze again). In most other cases, you're still fast enough to get out of the way even with the snare from Tree of Life.